Dismissed for years as the “QAnon Congresswoman,” Greene leaves Washington a different woman. Drained of her bubbling “optimism,” as one source close to her put it, Greene is now divorced from her husband and divorced from her president — but faithfully married to the cause of America First.

It was, in Greene’s own telling, the algorithms that sent her spiraling into conspiracy theories in the 2010s. It was algorithms that rocketed her to prominence. It was algorithms that made her one of the GOP’s top fundraising assets. And it may have been algorithms that sent her packing, though they’ll almost certainly guide Greene to her next destination soon enough. 

This is a new form of populism, a strain that represents the online rage fueling an uneasy horseshoe alliance between the populist Left and Right. And it’s no longer confined to the internet. Greene’s arc is what happens when the everyman’s rage is stoked by social media — sometimes for the better and sometimes for worse — and then escapes the algorithm for Washington, DC. 

In her early days in DC, Greene was dogged by headlines like “Marjorie Taylor Greene indicated support for executing prominent Democrats in 2018 and 2019 before running for Congress” and “Video surfaces of Marjorie Taylor Greene confronting Parkland shooting survivor with baseless claim.” Sworn in about 24 hours before the Jan. 6 riot, Greene was elected amid pandemic fever, cruising to a comfortable victory, in which she won 75% of the vote. 

That put her about six points ahead of Donald Trump in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, situated in the state’s northwest corner between Tennessee and Alabama. Greene originally planned to run in her own, more affluent district that included some of Atlanta’s shifting  suburbs, but swapped her bid to the much less competitive 14th District, after the incumbent representative announced his retirement in 2019. 

Georgia 14, long home to the state’s carpet industry, is heavily rural and populated by voters who blame NAFTA and immigration for their economic struggles. Trump was impressed, calling her a “future Republican star” and sending the media — along with the GOP establishment — into a tizzy.  

Born in Milledgeville, a small city of 17,000 in central Georgia, Greene proudly remembers growing up around her family’s construction company. She graduated from South Forsyth High School in 1992, then the University of Georgia in 1996. Six years later, she purchased Taylor Commercial from her father.

In 2022, after 29 years together and 27 years of marriage, Greene’s husband Perry filed for divorce. Greene herself had filed 10 years earlier amid allegations of cheating, though the pair reconciled before calling it quits after she entered Congress. Several months later, Greene and newly divorced conservative media figure Brian Glenn — best known for questioning Volodymyr Zelensky’s wardrobe in the Oval Office — confirmed they were dating. They became engaged on Monday.

Like many Gen-X moms, Greene racked up an extensive Facebook history during the 2010s. Animated by the strains ObamaCare had put on her family’s successful business, the future congresswoman got hooked on Trump early. 

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But her sense of injustice and distrust also sent her in bizarre directions. She questioned whether school shootings were false flags, whether a plane really hit the Pentagon, and what was going on with the internet poster named “QAnon.” Her Wikipedia page is full of reminders of a febrile recent past, including forays into #Pizzagate and Seth Rich, among other conspiracy theories, as Greene used Facebook as a form of activism and started blogging for a website called American Truth Seekers sometime around 2017. 

In the spring of 2019, Greene shouted at Parkland survivor David Hogg in Washington, and filmed a Facebook Live video outside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office telling the lawmaker to “get rid of your diaper.” 

A little more than a year later, the mother of three, Crossfit enthusiast, and small-business owner earned her own office on Capitol Hill, not unlike AOC, the bartender-turned-congresswoman she’d been yelling at months earlier.  

Her pandemic-era campaign made good use of the backlash. “I’ve made all the right enemies,” Greene tweeted during her run. “The Fake News Media hates me. Big Tech censors me. The DC Swamp fears me. Now Soros and the Dems are trying to take me down. I’m running to Save America and Stop Socialism.”

But it was in the new year, after Jan. 6, that a newly elected Greene delivered one of the most significant speeches on the House floor in modern history. Her remarks barely budged the perception of Greene in Washington, and were quickly forgotten. But they shouldn’t have been.

As a vote loomed to strip Greene of her committee assignments, she calmly took to the floor to explain herself. “What you need to know about me is I’m a very regular American, just like the people I represent in my district,” Greene said, mouth hidden behind a face mask emblazoned with the slogan FREE SPEECH. “And like most people across the country, I never, ever considered a run for Congress or even to get involved in politics. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t a political person until I found a candidate that I really liked, and his name is Donald J. Trump.”

But, Greene continued, “when we elected President Trump, and then I started seeing things in the news that didn’t make sense to me like Russian collusion, which are conspiracy theories also, and have been proven so, these things bothered me deeply, and I realized just watching CNN or Fox News, I may not find the truth.” 

“And so,” Greene remembered, it spiraled from there, “What I did is I started looking up things on the internet, asking questions, like most people do every day, using Google. And I stumbled across something and this was at the end of 2017 called QAnon.” 

Greene said she walked away from QAnon and fringe conspiracy trends later in 2018, after discovering holes in the theory. She said her campaign never mentioned the word QAnon. She said she believed Parkland survivor David Hogg.

The speech was contrite and honest, a genuine explanation for how her rational distrust of institutions steered her, and many others, down unfortunate rabbit holes. That experience, if anything, is utterly representative. In her case, it represents both the good and bad: asking the questions, believing the lies, then abandoning them when the facts went in another direction. 

But Greene’s words landed like a lead balloon in DC, where there is scant tolerance for the experience of the ordinary American outside the halls of power. Greene, though, managed to lose only 11 GOP votes when Democrats orchestrated a push to take away her committee assignments amid a full court press from media and the Beltway establishment. 

One congressional insider remembers a tense private meeting ahead of the vote. “She came in and it was during this bruising time of all of her Facebook posts and previous statements being unearthed. This was space laser time,” the insider said. But while Greene was “defiant at first,” she apologized. She stood up and said she was sorry to her fellow members for having to answer for her. “Anytime you get a reporter with concerns about me, you don’t have to answer, just tell them to talk to me,” she told the meeting, striking a “super conciliatory” tone, the insider says.

This “changed the whole mood of the room.” Republicans came up to the microphone and announced they’d vote in her favor. Greene had successfully “lowered the temperature.” 

The mild air, of course, did not last long. Outside the GOP conference, Greene shouted at AOC, repeatedly sought Joe Biden’s impeachment, shouldered heavy fines for refusing to wear a mask, and spoke at — then distanced herself from — a conference held by Nick Fuentes. 

Republicans took back the House majority in 2022, restoring Greene to committee assignments. Greene supported Kevin McCarthy for speaker, and the two remained on good terms even while the Florida populist firebrand Matt Gaetz, with whom Greene once embarked on an “America First” speaking tour, engineered McCarthy’s ouster. Ironically, it was Greene’s sparring with other MAGA populists that ended her time with the hard-Right House Freedom Caucus in 2023.

Nevertheless, “she was in a good spot, she was a productive member of Congress,” the congressional insider recalls of Greene’s tenure before this fall. That same source referred to Greene as Trump’s top “guard dog” in Congress for years. She defended Trump against virtually every charge for half a decade, before and after coming to DC. Just last year, Greene called the president “sweet” and said she was “loyal and unapologetically supported him everywhere and all the time.” 

It was the second Trump administration’s handling of Jeffrey Epstein documents that first drove a wedge between Greene and the president. Then Trump struck Iran, further alienating Greene, whose views on foreign policy lean toward an anti-interventionist flavor of “America First.” Finally, during the government shutdown, Greene started criticizing Republicans sharply for ignoring an imminent health-care crisis: the lapsing of subsidies that would send premiums skyrocketing for low-income people. This brought with it opportunities for the congresswoman, long Trump’s staunchest defender in the House, to join CNN and The View and 60 Minutes. 

By mid-November, Trump had enough. Deeming Greene “Wacky Marjorie,” he posted on Truth Social to say he’d endorse a primary challenge in Georgia 14. Just a few days later, Greene announced her retirement from Congress. 

Two sources separately pinned the blame for Greene’s turn on House Speaker Mike Johnson. As the government shutdown lingered for weeks and weeks, becoming the longest in history, Johnson didn’t take seriously the problem of members leaving DC with heaps of time on their hands. They were idle, looking for fights and itching for media hits. And it’s certainly true that Greene’s differences with Trump escalated during this time.

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Greene could be the tip of the iceberg for Johnson, who now faces a rumored wave of retirements from a deeply frustrated and demoralized conference. What should really keep Republicans up at night is whether Greene’s darkened sentiment is representative of voters, in the same way her experience on Facebook in the first Trump term represented a real growth in conspiracism fueled by institutional failure leading up to the pandemic.

Tempting as it may be to chalk Greene’s turn up to personal eccentricities, and that’s hardly out of the question, Republicans aren’t just losing a pain in leadership’s behind — they’re losing the member with the single highest share of small-dollar donors in all of Congress. 

And that’s not just about money. It means Greene resonates with her party’s base better than almost any lawmaker. (AOC is in a distant second place on that list.)

Yet her departure seems to have prompted a sigh of relief in the House. “I doubt there was a single member sad to see her leave,” one senior House Freedom Caucus source in the lower chamber told me, describing her behavior as “super unprofessional.” Other sources remembered her early days in Congress warmly, but acknowledged she came with a flip side. “She’s genuinely a nice person, but she can lose her shit and be a mean person too,” said one.

In Greene’s case, her policy populism came in temperamental populist packaging. That is to say, she opposed the substance of her party’s policy agenda during Trump II, from the economy to foreign policy, but stylistically she also opposed the longstanding norms of politeness and collegiality with the other side. As Democrats like Jasmine Crockett are starting to flirt with this personality populism, Washington should wonder whether it’s possible to keep a lid on both flavors — the substance and the style. 

Asked about Greene’s retirement, one insider pointed out the news didn’t leak strategically to Beltway rags or break in a juicy sitdown interview before the congresswoman made her announcement. She simply posted it to social media. Ostensibly unscripted and shot on a cellphone, the video featured Greene saying, “Loyalty should be a two-way street and we should be able to vote our conscience and represent our district’s interest, because our job title is literally ‘representative.’”

“She gets the value of wearing your heart on your sleeve,” the source noted. “That’s something Trump taught the Republican Party…. When she talks, a lot of conservative women across the country say, ‘You know what? I’m a pissed-off mom who’s getting crushed by all these stupid things in Washington.’ She’s been able to speak for a lot of people.” 

This is the Epistemology of the Algorithm, a double-edged sword. It exploits our reasonable distrust of institutions, pulling us into irrational conspiracies for rational reasons, stitching together paranoia and anger, driving highs and lows. Consider the Greene who “lowered the temperature” in the private GOP conference meeting ahead of Democrats’ effort to oust her from committees. Then consider the Greene who got booted from the Freedom Caucus. 

The insider described her jokingly as “bipolar,” but in a broader sense, that description makes sense. We’re in the liminal space between life before algorithmic social media and life after it. Gen X and Millennials aren’t quite one or the other. But we can see what’s coming, and Washington is not prepared. Greene wasn’t either.

A not insignificant part of Trump’s support came from algorithmic populists like Greene, people whose political awakening began with Trump and the reaction to him. They got online. They dug deep. They saw Trump as a disruptor. This is a populism built on social media, where the incentive system rewards strong emotion. It’s black and white: trust and distrust, love and hate, in or out. 

Trump’s second-term flirtation with elite interests, from Epstein to foreign policy to Big Tech, puts him on the wrong side of that equation for algorithmic populists like Greene. She’s only a representative for a few more weeks, but she will represent a virtual district of likeminded people for years to come. 

Like other braceros, my grandfather was sprayed with DDT, a toxic pesticide, upon entering the United States — a ritual humiliation born of American paranoia about Mexican “disease”. Wages were low and often stolen, while housing and transportation conditions were inadequate or downright dangerous. The program also helped depress wages for local workers, and to undermine their organizing efforts. Among the braceros themselves, organizing was extremely difficult; it was easy to deport any ringleaders back to Mexico.

The experience of men like my grandfather impelled the old Left, Mexican-American civil-rights groups, and the labor movement to oppose guest-worker programs. That opposition should extend to modern-day equivalents, such as the H1B visa, which allows tech firms to import what amount to white-collar braceros — and which has become the subject of an ongoing civil war on the American Right.

It’s no surprise, then, that Right-wing opponents of the H1 scheme found an unlikely ally in Sen. Bernie Sanders. Back in 2007, Sanders’s skepticism of guest-worker visas led the Vermont socialist to vote against a Bush-era immigration-reform bill that would have expanded such programs. Neoliberal Democrats would weaponize that record against Sanders in his subsequent runs for the party’s presidential nomination.

Today, as the Democratic Party reckons with its dramatic failure in the November election, Left populists have the chance to take the lead in forging a pro-labor approach to immigration — and, perhaps, a grand bargain with the populist Right that imposes order at the border and ends exploitative visas, while extending citizenship to the immigrant workers who have toiled and lived in the United States for years and sometimes decades.

The history of US agricultural labor underscores the need for a more worker-focused approach than the one progressives in recent years have adopted. Agriculture is the largest economic sector that remains excluded from basic New Deal-era labor protections. While workers in most other sectors have a federally protected right to form unions to defend their mutual interests, agricultural laborers do not.

Crucially, Mexicans were exempted from the 1924 Immigration Act that ended the Ellis Island era of mass immigration — often cited by a number of immigration skeptics as their ideal law — precisely because agricultural employers in western states wanted to continue exploiting Mexican workers. The easy deportability of these migrants was a significant selling factor for agricultural employers, continuing a long tradition of employers preferring labor that is easier to exploit and get rid of.

This is the same pattern — do what the boss says or get deported — promoted by modern guest-worker programs. That pattern goes back to their bracero origins, which proved so popular among employers that it continued to grow long after the war had ended, and even as demobilized vets — such as a young Cesar Chavez, the founder of the United Farm Workers union, where I work — came home and went looking for work in the fields. It was only after a horrific accident involving an overcrowded employer-owned vehicle that killed more than 40 bracero farm workers in 1963 that the program came to an end.

Notably, within a year of its termination, the first successful effort to unionize US agricultural workers began with the UFW’s historic 1965 grape strike in Delano, California. The confidence that striking workers could no longer be easily replaced by braceros was indispensable.

This history echoes today in the H2A agricultural guest-worker program, which is also rife with abuse. Federal investigations have repeatedly uncovered everything from forced labor to employers stealing worker wages to make political contributions. Unlike the H1B visa, which nominally gives recipients a chance at becoming Americans, the non-immigrant H2A visa explicitly excludes agricultural guest workers from future citizenship.

Even worse, workers’ visas are entirely dependent on their employers, effectively allowing bosses to deport a worker at will, or to simply not renew the visa for the next harvesting season — the most convenient way to ensure any potential troublemaker asking about wages or workplace safety will never again set foot in America. Needless to say, the H2A scheme has exploded in size over the past decade, severely undercutting the wages and jobs of the US-citizen workers who still make up a significant share of our agricultural labor force.

Could populist conservatives end such abuse on their own? The short answer is no.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for the incoming Trump II administration, explicitly called for a “cap and phase-down” of H2A guest-worker visas with the aim of “increasing employment for Americans in the agricultural sector”. Yet Big Agriculture, a much more powerful Republican constituency, wants to see H2A expanded and made cheaper by lowering wages.

As it is, the H2A visa program is already uncapped, meaning there is no legal limit to how many workers it can bring in. The only limits are the costs it imposes on employers required to provide housing, food, and transportation, with growers frequently cutting corners to keep costs down and ignoring the requirement to first offer jobs to local workers.

Still, employers are bent on expanding the H2A program to year-round industries, and worst of all, they want to reduce the federally mandated wages they must pay these workers. In a bitter irony, the prospect of mass deportations is now being used by some industry lobbyists as just the latest excuse to expand the H2A program, saying, in effect: If you get rid of one cheap foreign workforce, we’ll need another one to replace it.

Shockingly, the agricultural lobby, with help from several Republican attorneys general, has even opposed a Biden administration rule requiring seat belts on company vehicles transporting H2A workers. This includes the attorneys general of Idaho and Washington state, where deadly bus crashes involving seatbelt-less company vehicles have left dozens of H2A workers dead.

Unbelievable as it may seem to many conservatives, it was the Biden administration that sought to protect jobs of American workers against displacement by H2A workers. In sharp contrast, it was the first Trump administration that accommodated Big Ag’s priorities on H2A, cutting their wages and thus making it cheaper to displace American workers. Donald Trump even granted H2A workers a special exemption to his Title 42 executive order closing down the border, making sure H2A workers could continue to enter the country during the pandemic.

Put another way: the populist Right, on its own, doesn’t have the influence within the Republican coalition to restrict programs like H1B and H2A in the face of powerful corporate constituencies like Big Tech and Big Ag. The populist Right’s arguments against mass migration may have helped the GOP make historic gains among working-class voters, including with many Latinos who compete in the same economic sectors with new arrivals. But that doesn’t change the fact that Right-wing populists lack the muscle to take on Silicon Valley’s preferences on H1B or Big Ag’s preferences on H2A. The nonstop pilgrimages of tech barons such as Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg to Mar-a-Lago will see to that.

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Thus, any serious effort to reform the legal immigration system will need to attract progressives like Sanders who understand the negative impact of guest-worker programs on American workers of all races. Trade unions would be critical in forging such a bipartisan coalition. However, labor has one major demand from any immigration reform effort: an amnesty for existing undocumented workers.

This demand is born out of the most basic duty of any union: loyalty to members. Every union has a legal duty to represent every member of a bargaining unit, regardless of immigration status. The threat of deportation isn’t theoretical to labor. Organizers know from bitter experience that workers who are afraid of getting deported are harder to organize. Many have seen first-hand how the immigration status of outspoken worker leaders is used to silence or even deport them.

Expanding union density in the 21st century, then, requires taking into account the interests of undocumented workers. While employers may be happy to exploit these workers indefinitely without ever extending citizenship rights, the labor movement is locked in as a powerful constituency in favor of a pathway to citizenship. This disposition unavoidably complicates the populist Right’s efforts to consolidate into a coherent pro-worker project.

Despite this, there remains the outline of a deal here for those paying attention: legislation that restricts exploitative guest-worker programs such as H1B, H2B, and H2A, while extending a pathway to citizenship to the undocumented workers who are already here. Such a compromise could be combined with E-Verify provisions to effectively ensure a closed labor market going forward and assuage concerns on the Right about spurring further migration.

This would be an immigration platform designed to appeal to Main Street, not Wall Street, and one which the emerging populist center of American politics can rally behind. Call it the American Workers First Act, with four major provisions: restrictions on guest-worker programs; amnesty for undocumented workers without criminal records; mandatory E-verify going forward; and substantial investments in US workforce development.

This is admittedly a long shot in the current political climate. Any deal would need to include a sizable enough amnesty for Democrats to turn on powerful constituencies that would oppose any restriction to guest-worker programs, such as Silicon Valley. In turn, any deal that includes the dreaded A-word, would have to overcome significant skepticism on the Right, and likely necessitate other significant concessions to restrictionist priorities.

But despite the obvious challenges, it’s easy to see what both the populist Right and the labor Left have to gain from such a bargain. For the Right, America would keep the predominantly Latino (and mostly socially conservative) longtime residents already living here, while compelling them to learn English and pay taxes. In exchange, restrictionists would get to slash the number of migrants coming legally for the first time since 1924.

For the labor Left, such a deal is first and foremost a pathway to citizenship for very deserving and hard-working people. Extending full citizenship and labor rights to the undocumented workers who make up a large share of the workforce in sectors such as agriculture, hospitality, caregiving, and construction also creates new organizing opportunities. Many Democrats would no doubt still strongly oppose a compromise that went against the interests of major corporations. But the political pressure to seize the long-awaited opportunity for a pathway to citizenship would be unavoidable.

Could any Democratic senator really tell her constituents that she voted to keep the Mexican grandmothers undocumented in order for Elon Musk to continue bringing in tech workers on demand from India?

This is the conversation we should be having. The days of relying on business interests to deliver Republican votes for immigration reform are clearly gone, and have been since at least 2013. For a labor Left looking to protect and empower our undocumented members, it is the populist Right we should be negotiating with.

An immigration policy truly concerned with the interests of American workers would recognize a highly exploitable permanent immigrant underclass as a threat to American jobs and wages — one best eliminated by extending the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, not by the cruel and unworkable fantasy of removal. American workers would be the biggest winners of a compromise which would leave them able to compete on a fair and level playing field.

Amid this chaos, Rishi Sunak — former Goldman Sachs banker — has become Britain’s new prime minister. Has the technocratic order of the 2010s returned? Or has the modern world moved beyond its reach? Read Gray’s diagnosis, as well as his interview with Freddie Sayers, below.

The revenge of the technocrats

The point about these people is they’ve learned nothing. There’s no practical way of going back to before 2016. Already in 2016, the world hadn’t fully recovered from a near catastrophic financial crisis which these adults in the room, these extremely intelligent men and women, had given us. The halcyon period of technocratic competence included, going back to the start, long-term capital management melting down in 1998, after Russia defaulted on its debt. That was patched up but it also began what later was called quantitative easing … You then had the 2007-2008 crash. And you also had gruesome sideshows like 20 years in Afghanistan. This is what the adults in the room, this is what the technocrats, the people who are now coming back as safe hands, as competent administrators, this is what they did. So their record is not at all one of competence. It’s one of repeated near-disaster.

They think of themselves as the way of the future. But the future has melted down. It’s not there anymore; their future’s gone. Their future was one in which the whole world would marketise, in which geopolitics would surrender to geoeconomics, global markets. All the states that were emerging, China, Russia and others, would see that their advantage lay with integrating into the global market. Geopolitical struggles would attenuate. They would still be there, but would become less important over time. The opposite has happened. The global market doesn’t exist the way it seemed to exist then and it’s certainly not evolving towards this global market stability that they expected. So, the fundamental problem in this nostalgia, this Osbornist technocratic project, is that they’re adapting to a world that no longer exists, and isn’t coming back. It is a hopeless nostalgia.

What the Tories get wrong about Brexit

Insofar as Brexit’s a Tory project, it is: Global Britain, supply-side reforms, free market, open the British economy even more to the buffeting of the world. Whereas what people wanted in the North and the Midlands, and other parts of the country, from Brexit, I think, was some shelter from those storms. They wanted not a smaller state, a state that had retreated even further. They wanted actually, maybe not a bigger state, although most of them I think probably did, but one which was more protective of them and more concerned with their wellbeing and more active. So the majority of those who voted for Brexit did not vote — perhaps the overwhelming majority — for the reasons that the Tory Brexiteers thought. And that, of course, introduced a contradiction in the whole Tory Brexit project, which meant it couldn’t work.

Why the technocrats don’t get populism

The only way they could understand these movements, what they called populism, was to say that these are stupid, ignorant people. If they merit any sympathy, it’s that they’re being misled by demagogues. But there can be no real merit, no logic, no justice to their claims. And so that itself was a failure of intelligence. I think populism is a term liberals apply to the political blowback of their policies that they fail to comprehend. It was caused by them…

But I think apart from anything else, apart from the morally, profoundly repellent and even abhorrent attitude these technocrats, these liberals, these progressives, technocratic and otherwise, had for their fellow citizens — apart from that — it’s a failure of understanding. Where did it come from? The devil? Where did this strange sort of diabolical combination of demagoguery and mass stupidity suddenly emerge from? It’s a tremendous failure of intelligence and it’s being repeated.

The technocrats now believe they’ve got a second chance and they’re back in the seats of power. They haven’t got the conceptual equipment to understand that forces other than those that fit into their largely economic view of the world — and of human beings themselves and of human action, it’s an economic view of human action — isn’t realistic and doesn’t really work and they can’t acquire the skills without taking too much out of their worldview.

Why Rishi will fail

Anyone who thinks Rishi Sunak is going to be able to stabilise the boat of the British economy to the point at which growth can resume in a few years — they’ve only got two years more in office — is completely delusional. Because the recessionary forces — put aside even war — in the world economy are very, very strong. And the combination of tightening monetary policies with tightening fiscal policies, with higher taxes, lower spending, and cutting back on quantitative easing, can only exacerbate all kinds of painful trends for the general population. So it’s not going to be politically stable. I’m not convinced that the internal cannibalism of the Conservative Party will permit Rishi to even last to January 2025. There could be another cycle of regicide and folly. But then Labour come in, and then what do they do? Because they are actually also committed to Osborne’s vision.

Why Labour will fail 

They’ve joined the critique that the Tories were being fiscally irresponsible, and that the responsible thing is to obey the markets… But where’s the money going to come from? If they do shut down remaining forms of energy production, which they regard as damaging, where are the workers going to go? What will happen to Labour when it stops working, when the mixture of Osbornism and green utopianism breaks down, is that the party will internally fracture. I don’t necessarily mean a revival of the Corbynites but there are lots of people within Labour who are prepared to accept the bland neo-technocratic ideology of Starmerism because they think it’s a winning one. And it is a winning one, if only because the Conservatives have made such a mess of things.

Why the far-Right might rise

Mosley didn’t get very far in the Thirties. There wasn’t a single fascist MP in the Commons. We’ve remained, actually, relatively untouched by that. But one of the reasons we’ve remained, not untouched, but where we’ve been able to fend off those dangerously anti-liberal movements, is that the Conservative Party actually was able to moderate them and incorporate them within a broader political project that included social democracy, that included a paternalistic High Toryism, which included various strands. If the Conservative Party is going to melt down, which I think it’s in the process of doing now, then there are obviously risks, even in Britain, of something like that. I don’t know if people really, 10 or 15 years ago, thought that in Sweden there would be a government which depended for its support on having more or less a de facto coalition with the far-Right. But that’s the case now, is it not?

Why we need Proportional Representation 

The best outcome would be a change in the electoral system. I’ve not always accepted first-past-the-post. I used to support, 20 or 30 years ago, changes like the Alternative Vote. I think the only way that we’re going to get fresh thinking and a way through the intractable conjunctions that we face — the failure of the Global Britain Brexit, and the almost non-attempt at the more protective and state-centred Brexit that people really wanted — is by breaking up the existing party system and having a wider variety of parties and ideas.

Tensions were running high last week. Insults shot back and forth during the final TV debates. “Are you done lying yet?” one of the politicians said impatiently, “Then it’s my turn now.” Cue much delight on Twitter.

One of the key causes of current disruption, though, was glaringly absent from the highly-staged, high-stakes debates. Vox, a radical Right-wing group founded a mere six years ago, was not eligible to participate because it didn’t have any elected representatives in Madrid. Not any longer. Vox has since claimed 24 seats in Spain’s parliament – the first far-right grouping to win any seats since the death of Franco, in 1975.

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For many in Spain, the growing appeal of these populists is alarming. It certainly is for the conservative Popular Party (PP), which was humiliated in the ballot as its number of seats more than halved from 137 in 2016’s vote to 66. It’s a threat too, to the other main party on the Right, Ciudadanos, which entered the Spanish parliament in 2015 with around 14% of the vote. Though it remained steady at 16% yesterday.

But those most alarmed are on the Left, particularly the centre-Left Socialist Party (the PSOE), whose leader, Pedro Sánchez, has been Prime Minister since last summer, and Podemos, the young party to the Left of the Socialists. For them, Vox represents social and political regression in its purest form and will doubtless give them a turbulent time as they try to form a coalition from a fragmented system.

Vox was founded in late 2013 by Santiago Abascal, a former official of the Popular Party and Vox’s current leader. He left the PP because he felt it was abandoning its conservative values and getting too soft on Catalan and Basque secessionism. He now refers to his former party as “the tiny, cowardly Right”.

It didn’t break through until December of last year at which point it won more than 10% of the vote in the regional elections in Andalusia — a region especially affected by unemployment, immigration, and economic stagnation – helping to oust the Left, which had governed since 1982. Its appeal has subsequently been spreading across the country, with Abascal’s rallies drawing large crowds.

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Socially extremely conservative, Vox has been carefully tapping in to voter anxieties which are fuelled by culture wars and an acute sense of loss: the loss of a former way of life, of national sovereignty, of their privilege as well as the loss of jobs. Immigration is partly blamed for this. With some 50,000 people crossing the Mediterranean in 2018, Spain has now replaced Italy as the main hub for migrants from Africa. But the Catalan and Basque attempts at secessionism are also seen as agents of unwanted change and a betrayal of Spain.

Vox offers an affirmation of traditional, unapologetic, masculine Spanishness. “The Left will never succeed in making us feel ashamed for that which only merits pride,” said Abascal at a rally last autumn. This is Spanish politics, cowboy-style: Vox’s campaign video shows its leader crossing a plane as a lone ranger on horseback.

Abascal proudly invokes Spain’s unity and Catholicism while calling for drastic measures against immigrants, particularly of a Muslim background. He defends family values and stands up for men against the oppression of “feminazis”. He champions hunters and bullfighting, opposes gay marriage (which has been legal since 2005), and wants to outlaw abortion, even in cases of rape.

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Could Spain's Pedro Sánchez save Europe's centre-Left?

By James Bloodworth

While the Left accepts the fact that the Spanish state contains various nations, including Catalonia, Galicia, and the Basque Country — a political reality enshrined in Spain’s constitution — Vox calls for a return to centralism. Along with Ciudadanos and the PP, Vox is radically opposed to Catalan claims to self-determination. In fact, it proposes to make pro-independence parties illegal.

It’s partly in reaction to the Catalan bid for independence that Vox has managed to revive patriotism so powerfully. In post-Franco Spain, flag-waving jingoism was long considered in bad taste outside of any context that did not involve the national football squad. But Vox has embraced a full-throated Spanish nationalism, promoting the flag waving and everything else it entails.

It celebrates myths and heroes that could have been lifted directly from Francoist textbooks: the conquest of the Americas, the Catholic “reconquest” of Spain in the 1492 after centuries of Muslim “domination” and El Cid. There are other echoes from more recent history, too. Several prominent Vox candidates have been shown to have an extreme-right past. The party’s number two for Barcelona, for example, is a former candidate for Fuerza Nueva, a violent neofascist group.

The Catalan crisis is definitely a factor in Vox’s rise in a country that was long considered immune to the anti-immigrant, right-wing populism that has emerged in many other countries. But more important is the feeling that the progressive urban political elites have neglected their needs and disparaged their traditions and culture. This disconnect is something we are seeing throughout Europe. And  is felt particularly strongly in rural populations. But the Vox message has also found purchase in wealthier, culturally conservative voters; this could be down to the fact that the party twins its conservative nationalist message with more liberal economic proposals (it seeks, for example, to reduce corporate tax rates, and abolish inheritance tax and estate tax altogether).

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How the Left failed flyover Spain

By James Bloodworth

Vox’s successful rise, and its leaching of voters from the other two parties on the right, unleashed a savage competition between Ciudadanos and the PP – pushing both to the Right. It was a battle, though, that the PP lost.

It falls, then, to the Socialists and Mr Sánchez – who won, but without a majority – to attempt to form a centre-Left coalition with Podemos, possibly with the support of the Catalan and Basque parties. This option, though, isn’t particularly favoured by the financial sector, which is nervous about Podemos’s proposals, which include raising the minimum wage, investing in health care and education, instituting a financial transaction tax, and cracking down on corporate tax evasion. And the separatists are seen as toxic by the centre Right, which will make it difficult for Sánchez to appeal to them for support.

Spain needs a stable government to tackle its many challenges: the economy has been growing at a bit over 2% but unemployment rates in some regions remains over 20%. The educational, judicial, and pension systems need overhauling, and it is desperate for a negotiated solution to the constitutional conundrum of its territorial make-up, which has paralysed the country for several years now.

It’s unlikely any coalition will bring stability; Spain isn’t used to them. And to make things worse, the entire country is going back to the polls on May 26 for regional, municipal, and European elections. This will make it harder for parties to commit to the concessions that coalitions require. Expect further division and disruption, now that the people have spoken.

Generally, they have succeeded in implementing many aspects of their agenda, pushing the political conversation toward their direction. They also start to become ‘normal’ political parties, subject to the same types of activities and bargaining found in more traditional parties. Their stances are clearly not to everyone’s liking, but their impact and durability can no longer be denied.

Blue-collar populists have had the most success in their signature issue, restricting migration. Norway[2. Norway tightens asylum policy to cut numbers.], Denmark[3. Danish parliament passes contentious ‘ghetto’ plan.], Switzerland[4. Switzerland’s new immigration statute sets high hurdle for citizenship.], and Austria[5. The long honeymoon of Austria’s right-wing alliance.] have all tightened their policies on refugees since populist parties entered into government, and Italy’s government[6. Thousands march for refugee rights in Italy.] is in the process of following suit. America’s populist president, Donald Trump, is yet again embroiled in a dispute with Congress over immigration policy as he attempts to reduce the number of illegal migrants who enter and reside within America. Poland[7. Poland only accepts returning Poles under migration policy.] and Hungary’s[8. Orban digs in against European Commission on migration policy.] populist governments have also rejected pressure from the European Union to accept Syrian and other Middle Eastern refugees as part of the EU’s common policy.

Just the threat that blue-collar populist parties could take power has often been enough to push governments to propose migration restrictions. The Dutch Prime Minister fought off a challenge from conservative populist Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in 2017 when he took a more demanding tone towards migrants, telling them in an open letter “act normal or get out”, and he has played a strong role in reducing African migration into the EU[9. Rutte says EU deal to reduce migration is a big step forward.]. Sweden’s major parties both tacked to the right on immigration in this year’s general election to fend off the Sweden Democrats, as did Norway’s Labour and Centre parties in that country’s 2017 election. Angela Merkel’s government followed suit this year in a bid to help her CDU/CSU alliance win two recent state elections. Even French President Emmanuel Macron recently mentioned immigration as a concern to be dealt within his speech addressing the gilets jaunes protestors.

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Could the gilets jaunes topple Macron?

By John Lichfield

Denmark’s blue-collar populist Danish People’s Party’s (DF) two-decade growth in strength has even forced the long dominant Social Democrats to abandon allies on the left in the run up to next year’s campaign. Breaking a twenty-five-year agreement with the Social Liberal Party, Social Democratic leader Mette Frederiksen has led her party to vote with the bourgeois-populist government on a number of immigration restriction measures in the current parliament, including a ban on wearing burkas in public[10. Danish parliament passes ban on burqa and niqab.] and a controversial effort to combat “ghettos” where many Muslim immigrants live.[11. Danish parliament passes contentious ghetto plan] The populists have been so successful that there is now a new party to its right, the New Right, which argues that the DF is not tough enough on migration. Polls currently show it is likely to surpass the 2% threshold to enter the Folketing.

Even Hillary Clinton has got in on the act, recently saying that Europe needs to “get a handle on immigration” to stop the rise of blue-collar populism. Restricting immigration and reducing the number of Muslim refugees may remain very unwelcome policies among Western elites, but virtually everywhere else it’s a winning issue, forcing any leader who seeks to form a government to shift with the prevailing winds and endorse policies that would have been unacceptable five years ago.

Conservative populists have had an impact in other policy areas too. Norway’s Progress Party started as an anti-tax protest movement and to this day the party insists it’s more of a classical liberal party than a populist one. In government, its leader, Siv Jensen, took the Finance Ministry and has worked with Conservative (Hoyre) Party Prime Minister Erna Solberg to cut income taxes and eliminate the inheritance tax. The centre-Right coalition has also implemented a long-time Progress Party proposal to finance these cuts by taking money directly from Norway’s large sovereign wealth fund to pay for current spending.

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How irresponsible Merkel let populism thrive

By Peter Franklin

In contrast, the Danish People’s Party consciously places itself between the traditional Left and Right on economic matters. In practice, this means the party approves of tax cuts for lower-income workers but not for higher-income earners. Their opposition to this forced a smaller member of the governing centre-Right coalition, the libertarian Liberal Alliance, to abandon its plans to reduce the top income tax rate in the 2018 budget.

Italy’s conservative populists, the Lega Party, has also used its newfound power to push for radical changes in fiscal policy. It had campaigned for a 15% flat tax to replace the current progressive regime that includes rates up to 43%. It had also called for reductions in the retirement age. Its government partners, the more centrist populist Five Star Movement, had campaigned on a 780 Euro a month universal basic income. While a recent budget agreement with the EU forced both parties to scale back their programme, the new Italian budget will include increased spending and dramatically lower taxation, precisely the opposite of what the prior, more establishment-friendly budget had envisioned.

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Europe's democratic difficulties

By Helen Thompson

Populist economics has also found a home in the United States. President Trump signed a massive corporate tax cut in late 2017 while also approving dramatic hikes in both domestic and military discretionary spending. The deficit has ballooned as a result, rising to nearly $800 billion (3.9% of GDP) in fiscal year 2018. The deficit is expected to further widen to nearly $1 trillion, or over 4.5% of GDP, in the coming fiscal year. Populist economic policy is spreading and is likely to have as much impact over the long term as its migration programme already has.

For the most part, fears about populism being inimical to democracy have proved ill-founded. Concerns that President Trump would become an autocratic strongman have faded as he acted in accord with his constitutional powers and accepted policy reversals when checked by other branches of government. No populist party in coalition has even tried to move against the press or attempted to criminalise political opposition. While some of these parties did grow out of movements with roots in authoritarianism or fascism, as the parties have grown, those elements have usually been dismissed or checked.

In Eastern Europe, though, the picture is a little less reassuring. Hungary’s Fidesz government has acted in ways reminiscent of authoritarian governments, especially in its use of state resources to mount openly political campaigns. Opposition political activity is not formally restricted, but the difficulty in attracting private advertisement for newspapers critical of the government has drastically reduced the number of openly critical press sources. Polarised between the Fidesz-supporting rural areas and opposition to him in Budapest and with the opposition split, politics is freer than it is in Putin’s Russia, but not as open and fair as elsewhere in the EU. Moreover, the invoking of ethnic nationalist themes in election campaigns is unlikely to be echoed by mainstream Western politicians.

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The far right's plans to capture Europe

By Ian Birrell

Poland is another worrying case. The governing Law and Justice Party (PiS) attracted worldwide opprobrium when it overturned a law that had allowed the outgoing Civic Platform party (PO) to appoint a significant number of judges to the country’s Constitutional Tribunal. Since then, PiS has continued to pass laws that give its government greater control over the judiciary and public prosecutors. It has also placed the state media directly under government control, leading to what some opponents say is blatantly biased press coverage. The EU has threatened to suspend Poland’s voting rights as a result of these actions.

We must always be prepared to protect democracy, but we also must avoid the temptation to cast aspersions on the legitimacy of votes that don’t go the way we want, and even to change the rules as a result of them. Those opposed to conservative populism have claimed that both the Brexit referendum victory and the election of Donald Trump might have been fraudulently obtained by Russian state propaganda on social media. Law enforcers will duly reach their own conclusions on those issues. But American opponents of Trump have called for Democrats to expand the number of Supreme Court justices and appoint their favoured judges should they obtain control of Congress, exactly the type of allegedly anti-democratic action PiS has engaged in. Democracy is a fragile flower, and its flourishing ultimately rests on the willingness of the losers to accept results they disagree with.

Western countries have now had some form of democratic elections for over a century. In that time, we have grown used to a Left-Right political landscape, one that developed only over time and only in countries where the primary political dispute was over how to handle the Industrial Revolution and the rise of Communism. If one goes back to the mid-19^thCentury, many European countries were divided between Liberals who sought to expand democracy and free markets and combat the power of crowns and clerical gowns and Conservatives who opposed them. The current landscape emerged only when those battles faded in significance and new alliances were drawn to meet new challenges.

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Europe's biggest test yet

By Matthew Goodwin

There were always outliers to this landscape. Irish politics was divided for nearly 80 years along the lines of which side you supported in the Irish Civil War, and Israeli politics was originally divided on the question of how a party related to Zionism. Scandinavian politics has long had room for agrarian parties that did not fit neatly into the Left-Right continuum, as did many Eastern European countries in the interlude between the World Wars. The basic insight is that democratic politics organises around the questions that divide a people at a particular moment in time; parties are not, and should not be, frozen in amber.

Conservative populism represents a growing number of people who want different questions asked and answered. So long as this continues, we should expect these parties and figures to remain strong and active players in their nations’ politics. The evidence so far shows that as unconventional as their policies may seem, they can successfully compete in a free and vibrant democratic playing field and can operate as responsible actors when they obtain government. So long as the problems they address remain unsolved, we should expect to see the issues they champion and many of the solutions they advocate to remain on the Western agenda, and perhaps influence the course of history as decisively as did the rise of social democratic parties in the last century.